Let us eat cake

I stopped by @PresidentMcPhee's house Tuesday afternoon, with a couple of colleagues, for his annual campus holiday reception. He met us at the door and instantly remarked on what a nice conversation we had the other week, when he visited our Environmental Ethics & Action class to discuss the ACUPCC. (Let's keep pushing on that!)

And then he directed us into the parlor, where the baby grand piano was groaning under the weight of a cake designed to resemble this humble Carolina abode:

Whatcha think, Scott? Maybe next year we can persuade him to order up from Aramark an Earthship cake?

Earth Days

Here's where we'll begin, in the Environmental Ethics and Activism course at MTSU this Fall.

"...abusing the environment without any thought to the consequences." 

The trailer:


The film:

Environmentalism and social justice

All social justice organizations can trace their origins back to the 18th century...

Paul Hawken's Long Now

Long-term environmentalism from the author of Blessed Unrest.



Taking the long view on the environmental movement, Paul Hawken discovered that something very large and transformative is going on. For four decades Paul Hawken has created organizations and books that advance the environmental agenda. The books include the now-classic NATURAL CAPITALISM (1999, with Amory Lovins), THE ECOLOGY OF COMMERCE (1993), GROWING A BUSINESS (1987), and THE NEXT ECONOMY (1983). Currently Paul is founding the Natural Capital Institute and several companies for Pax Scientific. He chaired the US introduction of The Natural Step and co-founded the great gardening mail order catalog, Smith & Hawken. His 1966 company Erewhon helped create the natural foods movement.

This is one of a series of Seminar About Long Term Thinking by The Long Now Foundation www.longnow.org

Shift happens

"We can't afford, the planet can't afford, for poor people not to have solar panels!" Van Jones

Environmental Ethics

A note to those still making course decisions for Fall: 

I'm doing environmental ethics again, with a focus on activism: can there be an effective and responsible Green Movement, given the political climate, the machinery of media disinformation, etc.? To my mind, thinking about things like the long-term health of the planet and our status as the thinking/planning/deciding part of nature is the practical point of making such a big deal of atheism & philosophy. As Carl Sagan said, there's no sign of help coming to save us from ourselves. The question is, can we save ourselves?

Every day is Earth Day.